Measurements of tissue mechanical properties can be used to assist in the assessment of health and functionality of organs and other distinct parts of an organism. For example, ultrasound based strain or strain rate images of the heart muscle, known as the myocardium, can be used to measure the ability of the heart muscle to contract with high spatial and temporal resolution. Such assessment may be useful in diagnosing and monitoring patients with various forms of heart disease. In order to perform such measurements, the displacement of tissue is typically tracked using cross correlation methods. Correlation processing of ultrasound data for tissue tracking is, however, computationally intensive for large search regions with many pixels. In addition, the computations increase with the size of the correlation search area. Thus, tracking large displacements over full ultrasound frames requires greater computational resources, impacting system performance, processing design and cost. Thus, there is a need in the ultrasound field to create an improved method for speckle tracking. This invention provides such improved method.